Thus, as Justice Ginsberg also writes, in holding that Hobby Lobby is entitled to its own factual universe, in which contraceptives cause abortion and providing insurance is the same as using it, the Court has opened the door to any number of wild religious claims.FAITH LEADERS WANT GAY EXEMPTION

is pretty much a foregone conclusion. That, the recent decision in Town of Greece made clear - you'll get your Christianity regardless of whether you like it or not. And you'd better like it because it comes backed by the force of government. For those of you who weren't paying close attention, you might have missed the triumphalism in Scalia's voice when he wrote his dissent from denial of certiorari in the high-school-graduation-in-church case, Elmbrook School District v. Doe:

Certain of this Court's cases, however, have allowed the aversion to religious displays to be enforced directly through the First Amendment, at least in public facilities and with respect to public ceremonies--this despite the fact that the First Amendment explicitly favors religion and is, so to speak, agnostic about music.

You were all tut-tutting and giggling about his hatred of Stravinsky and rock and, as usual, missed that he uses his bluster to hide the knife thrusts he's really there to make, staking out the ground for the next fight. Moving the middle, as the politicians say.

... who is through pussyfooting around, and is no longer going to put up with such ignorance and hate. Confronted by a noisy coterie of anti-gay protestors at downtown Seattle's Pride Parade last Saturday, she simply got angry. Grabbing one of the parade announcers' microphones from the podium, she proceeded to shout them down, telling them in no uncertain terms exactly what she and almost everyone else in attendance that day thought of them -- to the obvious appreciation of thousands of parade goers in the vicinity:

"If they followed by all the teachings of this book that they use to hate, they themselves are sinners. They are wearing cotton-poly blend! That is an abomination! [...] Why don't you read your own book and actually follow the teachings to the letter of God and learn to support and love? You need to drop the hate! You are a sad, sad excuse for a human being. Once you learn to drop the hate, you too can find happiness because we will welcome you in open arms, if you learn to open your mind! Not today, Satan! Not today! [...] Well, I'll say that your Jesus Christ loves you, and loves me just as much! You misread that book! You need to go back to school and learn reading retention, because there's a lot more love in there than you've got in your heart! Get out of here! Drive that down to your pit of hate, and go home! You have no power here! Be gone -- before somebody drops a house on you!"

Maybe the rest of us need to emulate Mama T---'s example more often ourselves, by exercising our own First Amendment rights and getting in some Christianista faces, rather than always enduring the vice versa. Wouldn't that be a nice change?

And frankly, there is clearly no "us" in them. As Mama T--- just showed us, they are only empowered when and if we choose to empower them ourselves -- which we do each time we ignore what they do to others in the name of the Lord.

But when people confront these clowns, their spell is broken and their hold on public consciousness is correspondingly diminished. If we want to see meaningful change, then we must become an instrument of that change ourselves.

I don't know what they will be but there will be a point at which people say enough. If that I'd demonstrations and/or boycotts of these organizations or massive voter turnout or what, this will have consequences.

WASHINGTON--The Supreme Court's divisions over contraception tore open again Thursday, when the three female justices accused an all-male court majority of going beyond the Hobby Lobby decision to interfere with insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, filed a 17-page dissent to a court order allowing Wheaton College, a Christian institution in Illinois, to stop covering birth control without filing a form with its insurer asserting religious objections to emergency contraception.

The majority's order, which was unsigned, "risks depriving hundreds of Wheaton's employees and students of their legal entitlement to contraceptive coverage," she wrote. And because many other religious nonprofits have raised similar objections to birth control, the ruling "will presumably entitle hundreds or thousands of other objectors to the same remedy."

The form at issue, which requires insurance companies to cover the cost of contraceptives, is the mechanism the Department of Health and Human Services devised last year to exempt religious nonprofits from subsidizing contraceptives they find objectionable.

--

"Wheaton believes that authorizing its [insurance administrator] to provide these drugs in Wheaton's place makes it complicit in grave moral evil," the college said in its injunction application filed Sunday with the court. "Wheaton can neither provide the mandated coverage nor execute and deliver" forms that prompt others to do so.

The college claims it can disregard the form under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law providing exemptions from federal regulations that impose a substantial burden on free exercise of religion while serving no compelling governmental interest that cannot be achieved otherwise. The Hobby Lobby ruling turned on the religious freedom law.

--

Justice Sotomayor wrote that filing a form can't be considered a "substantial burden."

"Wheaton is mistaken--not as a matter of religious faith, in which it is undoubtedly sincere, but as a matter of law," she wrote, adding the government's accommodation plan is the "least restrictive means of furthering the government's compelling interests in public health and women's well-being."

...than grains of sand on Earth and there are more atoms in one grain of sand than stars in the Universe.

If one could travel at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy. Which is one of an estimated 400 billion galaxies known to exist.

The good news, as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, and at 99.9% of the speed of light, time would be roughly 1/22nd of what it is on Earth. So the trip would only take ~4500 years for the travels, but the same 100,000 years for observers on Earth.

If you managed to actually hit the speed of light, which Einstein stated would take an infinite amount of energy, time would stop and the trip would be instantaneous for the travelers.

Which mean photons of light have not aged, even the ones we observe from the beginning of the Universe, some 13.7 billions years ago. To a photon that took billions of years to reach the cones and rods in your eye, its beginning and end are one in the same because there is no difference in time for the photon.

And believe or not, this is something that is easily observed. The GPS satellites circling the Earth at ~8700 mph have their internal atomic clocks adjusted for the the differences in time between them and slower rotating Earth. If they used the same clocks as Earth, each day they would fall 38 microseconds behind the ones on Earth and GPS accuracy would decline by roughly 6 miles a day.

What I wonder, is how our speed effects our perception of life. The Earth spins at ~1000mph, it rotates the sun at ~66,000 mph, the sun rotates within the Milky Way at ~483,000 mph. And it is believe that the Milky Way is traveling around a million mph.

This most certainly slows down time for us compared to an observer sitting motionless, but I wonder if that is something the human brain can perceive. Seems unlikely, but know that if we were motionless, the sun may have already burned out and the Earth might be just another rock circling a burned out star.

and around Kip Thorne he is required to wear a T-shirt proclaiming "I lost a bet to him", since Thorne's claims about time travel proved to be better than Hawking's claims and they bet on it.

But Hawking retorted that while Thorne's claims about the possibility of time travel were correct and it did seem possible there was still the problem of the intense radioactivity at the event horizon being so deadly that it would kill any human (or other known life form) crossing the event horizon.

in the Atlantic...here we go again. Not sure if it made it to hurricane speed yet but it is a strange one. It started up somewhere offshore of Palm Beach, moved a bit south and is now moving north towards Zorba and the rest of you up there. Good luck and have a happy and safe 4th of July.

... on Tropical Storm Douglas, presently at 19 N, 118 W. It's headed in our general direction, and is expected to reach hurricane status by tomorrow. Most all tropical storms and hurricanes that pose a potential threat to Hawaii first form off Mexico's west coast, then move westward into the mid-Pacific where they strengthen, especially in El Niño conditions as presently exist now.

But unlike the continent of North America, we present such a small target out here in the mid-Pacific that we've only been hit with three hurricanes in the last 55 years. The caveat is that those three hurricanes were all Category 4-5 whoppers, and each one devastated the island of Kauai, having initially passed south of the islands, only to double back and hit us from the southwest, moving in a northeasterly direction.

We are going to get rain tonight and possibly some gusty winds up here, but it doesn't look bad so far.
Of course, things could change.
And we are supposed to have sunny and breezy tomorrow.
But then, we are far from the Atlantic coast and way up in the mountains.

The last couple of days. And is supposed to last right thru the holiday. No air needed. It was actually chilly last night and this morning. 50s. It's been very hot for a while.
On the down side the family ancient weather oracle says her almanac and chicken bones say that the mostly cool very wet summer so far means a brutal coming winter. Much worse than last winter. Which was pretty terrible.

We don't mind so much. We have a tractor with a snow plow, a snow blower, a generator if we lose electricity, and a huge 4-wheel drive truck that can almost climb up the side of our barn in 4-wheel drive low, if necessary. Plus plenty of wood for our wood stove, and plenty of food. And we always have a lot of gasoline available for our generator and other gas powered stuff. Not to mention propane for our outdoor propane stove.
We are prepared, but I'm not so sure about others. ;-)

Except for those few acquaintances of ours who have over the years persisted in asking us why we live way up in the mountainous boonies and why we are so prepared for some, at least, contingencies. ;-)
OTOH, other acquaintances and friends have always been interested in whether they could come up here and crash, if it came to that.

During the golden age of Hollywood, the excitement of going to the movies wasn't only about seeing the stars on screen. It also meant spending time at the neighborhood movie theater, an architecturally ornate center of the community's social life.

Photographer Stefanie Klavens has long been interested in 20th-century American popular culture, specifically its aesthetic qualities, and has created a photographic series of iconic movie palaces titled "Celluloid Dreams."

Hope she makes it to the midwest sometime. The restored Chicago Theater is a favorite, and the Coronado Theater in my hometown of Rockford IL, where we saw most of our movies when I was a kid. It would be worth the $10 per ticket to see a movie in a place like that again!

go out to Silver Spring (red line Metro) and go to the AFI Silver theater and cultural complex, right in the middle of "downtown". I guess it's about 20 or so years ago, the American Film Institute took over the old art-deco Silver theater and now uses it for all sorts of films. With the full-size movie palace screen and a couple smaller screening rooms, IIRC. Retrospectives, film series, etc.

I saw North by Northwest in the big room there and Abe Lincoln's nose is a lot larger than one might think...

I think she may have photographed the Coronado. Unless there is another with that name. Pretty sure I remember that name. That was just a sample. She has enought for a coffee table book. Been doing it for years. Maybe the recent attention will finally make the book possible.
Once when she was visiting me in LA I went with her to photograph an old theater on the strip. The neon was on but it had been closed for years, as with many she has done, so we are across the street from this closed theater, in a bad part of town, with all her expensive stuff and her Hasselblads ans suddenly the bums and junkies see us and start wanting to know why we are up taking their pictures. I thought we were screwed. Clearly she had done this before, she explains what she is doing and whips out a bunch of her photos to prove it.
The situation was instantly defused and we bought a dime bag.

... was an excellent example of the late '20s / early '30s art-deco architecture that was so popular during that period. Alas, it was gutted in 2003 and only its shell remains. It now houses yet more upscale retail shops for tourists. Even longtime tourists who'd been coming to Waikiki for decades have lamented its loss.

At one time, Waikiki was home to three major film palaces dating from the '30s -- the Waikiki, the Kuhio and the Royal. There were also four other movie theaters down there, as well. As they all disappeared, so did the incentive for local residents from outside the district to spend an evening there, going to dinner and then taking in a movie. Nowadays, few residents venture down there except to work in the hotels, and the district's character has changed markedly with our departure from the scene.

Honolulu also had one of the few original '50s-era Cinerama Theatres remaining anywhere in the world, until its interior was similarly gutted by developers in 2005. Its shell is now home to an Auto Zone auto parts store.

Is amazing. It was falling down and got a total face lift. Back to it's original splendor. When I lived there they would have a silent movie every Halloween with Stan Kann. Who in addition to a world famous vacuum cleaner collection at his St Louis home was a great organist. The organ would rise up rotating from a hidden position with him playing.

... venues is the old Castro Theatre in San Francisco. When the Spouse and I were visiting that city about 12 years ago, our friends told us that the theatre was showing a week-long retrospective of classic films in their original 70mm format, so we decided to join them. On successive nights, we saw David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia," Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," Robert Wise's "the Sound of Music," and Ridley Scott's director's cut of "Blade Runner." Awesome!

Are simply not the same thing on anything but a big screen. Which svcks because I have gotten old and crotchety to the point that I literally hate going to a theater. Because people are idiots. I only do it for special occasions or on very off hours for something I really want to see big.

Since you now know her name you can follow her on FBook. She posts a lot of stuff there. She doesn't just do theaters. She has a wonderful series of diners. Like this one she gave me because she said it reminder her of me.

"Bottoms Up Dini Is 4'x5' and lives on my wall. The guy in the picture is Dini Lamot who I never met but is a friend of Stefs who was the lead singer in an 80s band from Boston, Stefs home base, called Human Sexual Response

According to my newest doctor, who is a nice guy, but who knows zip about me or my history with my back except what he sees on the latest images, I have "pretty severe chronic degenerative changes" to my back. I just sort of chuckled. Take a number, Doc. The first MD to tell me this said so in, hold your breath, 1984.

Sigh.

I'll be fine, almost assuredly. But if this is finally the time I'm NOT fine, when the structure has just collapsed, then so be it.

But I don't think so. I've lived with this styrofoam mess for my entire life. You deal like you gotta deal.

My husband has something very similar, strangely many helo pilots develop lower back degeneration, it has something to do with the vibration of the aircraft.

Because there are so many cases here they have had an excellent private practice with a large team of very good ortho surgeons set up shop nearby and they do everyone at Fort Rucker. Usually retired but they seem to return to work afterward, some even still doing instructor flying. They are very good at pain free outcomes with no pain meds in the future for many. We know so many people who have had to have something surgically done for that exact problem. Not my spouse yet, but like you he has spent years on different mattresses and now those foam toppers. He is in a blessed state of pain inactivity right now, but we have his X-rays and it's just a matter of time.

When the L5/S1 exploded the first time and took my foot/lower leg with it. Surgery was to cut away that splattered disk material all over the nerve and, hopefully, get my foot back as a result. Didn't work. Foot still gone. Which is why, barring some terrible turn for the worse, I'll get through it with only a slightly more numb foot. Small price to pay to avoid surgery that probably wouldn't do squat. As for what Howdy says about fusions, you have no idea how close I was to getting a fusion about six or seven years back. Found the good Doctor John Sarno just in time on that one. Best decision I ever made, not to get a fusion done. Gruesome sh*t I avoided, I have no doubt.

Melt Method. OK the website looks really stupid but I've been doing this for a couple of months to deal with hip problems with back pain. My daughter is doing it to help control localized seizures. I can do it at home tho a few in-person lessons are important.

I did fascia massage work with Josh when he was a baby, and as a toddler he went to a massage therapist still going to school for advanced in degrees in Boulder who did fascia work with him too. Nobody here possesses such knowledge though. The nearest I could find was Nashville, it is still on the table if he ever needs it.

My niece just graduated from Vermont in physical therapy, she also does crossfit which has her Uncle worried because some people in the military have torn their bodies up with crossfit, she is very hyper physical like her Uncle. He tries to tame her down, with as much success as anyone had with him at that age. But she has all sorts of homemade fascia massage devices, she doesn't have a still moment. If she isn't working out she's massaging her fascia :)

in 2006 I got a brain surgery to deal with a nerve issue. I tried everything else and was told it was inoperable and basically hopeless. Finally I found out I was operable and had the operation within one month. They did not actually remove my brain (like my sister says), but just moved it apart at the lobes and worked on the brain stem. Recovery took a while, mostly sleeping 18-22 (!) a day for weeks since nerves and brains heal in sleep. The nerves regenerated in 2 years and it was great for me. I was very lucky.

So, surgery involving nerves can work -but- finding a good, no great, neurosurgeon is essential, a specialist in that type of surgery. I found out that brain surgeons are rather like very focused, but swaggering gun slingers/cowboys, vain and cocky who concentrate like a laser when they decide to. I guess it takes super confidence and courage to muck around with someone's nerves and in their brain.

My dad had carpal tunnel surgery about 10-15 years ago and during the procedure the nerves in his hand went numb and never came back. His right hand is a flopping, completely useless appendage now.

A buddy had benign brain tumor that was adjacent to his cochlear (ear) nerve, and the very minor trauma that occurred to to that nerve during surgery to remove the cancer caused him to go completely deaf in that ear.

Anyway, I've had referred leg pain for a couple decades now from a herniated disk. Nothing, though, compared to you.

kind of problems in their lower back -vibration and potholes, combined with relative lack of exercise from sitting all day long.

I would consult with a good, knowledgeable doctor and start a regimen of "core" exercises to both stretch out and strengthen that part of one's body. Start with very low impact and work on flexibility first. Not just the back, but also places like the hamstrings, groin, abs, calves. Just about everything is connected to L5/S1 and the only way to address it, is to work on everything else, too.

It might not cure the problem - hardly anyone with an injured back ever goes back to "before" regardless of how assiduous or refined the treatment - but it should help. Just take your time and be persistent but gentle.

I've had so much painful inflammation in my whole hip area recently (since the membrane ripped) and went on an anti-inflammation regime. Pilates, Melt Method, and a ketogenic diet. After a month inflammation was greatly reduced and I've had more flexibility - even in post surgical areas from past surgeries. Pilates is good for strengthening the back and core muscles, Melt is good for massaging the connective tissues and releasing inflammatory fluids. Nothing seems to help with my dyslexic spelling tho.

It was more than almost exactly ten years ago. Oddly it was right at the time of that CN Tower pic I just posted. I was living and working in Toronto and came home because they thought he was dying. He did not but never walked again. Not really sure how much was about his doctors and how much was about the condition of his bones. Probably some of both.

one can sleep at a Holiday Inn the night before or discard those Texas Cowboy boots :-). Gov Perry is choosing the latter option.linkHe wore a Texas Cowboy boot during that debate (of OOPS fame) in 2012 and paid the price. The shoes killed the man's chances of being President!

... we look at Rick Perry and the other Lone Star politicians all dolled up for some cowboy kabuki and think, "All hat, no cattle."

I'd bet that relatively few people would ever associate Hawaii with cowboys, but the islands actually have a long ranching history, and the Big Island is home to Parker Ranch, which is the oldest cattle ranch in the United States. And at 250,000 acres and 35,000 head of cattle, it is also one of the country's largest, with about 950 miles of fenceline, 340 paddocks, and 15 corrals.

Founded in 1832 and formally incorporated in 1847 following the Great Mahele (formal division of island lands), Parker Ranch predates the oldest ranch in Texas by at least 20 years, as do our islands' own longstanding paniolo (cowboy) traditions.

(At 800,000 acres, King Ranch in southeastern Texas is the country's largest cattle ranch in area, and at 44,000 head, Deseret Ranches in central Florida -- owned by the Mormon Church, hence its name -- is presently the largest in terms of cattle numbers, but neither ranch's landholdings are contiguous like Parker Ranch.)

Today, the active cattle ranch itself presently takes up about 130,000 acres; since 1960, the rest of Parker Ranch's landholdings have been redirected to other business concerns, such as tropical agriculture, tourism and astronomical research.

The famed luxury resorts of the Kohala coast sit on Parker Ranch lands, as does the town of Waimea, one of the state's wealthier communities. At 2,500 feet elevation, it's also a whole lot cooler up there than along the arid coastline.

Elder Daughter has informed me that the oldest cattle ranch in the United States is Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk, New York (eastern Long Island), founded in 1658. Further, she says that John Parker actually first received his ranch charter from King Kamehameha I back in 1812 and not 1832. I then fact-checked her and she's right. I hate being shown up by my own child in history -- but then again, from whom did she learn to do that? Anyway, whenever it was, the existence of cowboys in New York and Hawaii long predate their appearance in Texas, both real and political.

He "surprised" the troops that day. My husband was outside in the tent city waiting for a flight back to Al Asad, he had just been home for R/R. The guys waiting in the tents outside ended up locked out for security reasons and received no Thanksgiving dinner so George W Bush could have this photo op. It was freezing cold outside too. My husband was carrying back a Christmas present for his best friend from his wife, it was a heavy blanket for the winter. He said that he went ahead and opened it and used it because he knew Mike wouldn't care given the circumstances. He said the guys stuck outside ate MREs in the middle of a dirt storm.

Then there was the Enterprise tornado that destroyed the high school here and killed seven. I got my daughter out of the school about 10 minutes before it was hit. Bush's disapproval ratings were hitting the roof so he showed up here the next day for a photo op. The same damn thing, the town ended up on mandatory curfew so the Pretzelnut could be safe. We were trying to sort through disaster, find photos and pets before the next rain and this selfish Phuck can only think about his photo op.

Will I ever stop bristling over the man and what his picture making has wrought those I love? I hate him so much sometimes, like when I see this photo, it is almost surreal.

visceral punch some photos evoke? The disconnect between what the photo seems to represent, and the backstory that reveals it to be a heartless, selfish sham, is wrenching.

In truth, I have a hard time looking at ANY photo - or seeing any video - of Bush, probably because I feel like his entire backstory is toxic, and it informed a lot of what he did. We don't hear much from him now, so I guess he's fully ensconced at Tara, where tomorrow never comes and one never has to think about the bad stuff = especially the bad stuff he started.

And Cheney? Hoo-boy. Usually, and with most people, I can generally find something, one thing, that "proves" that a person's character and inner self houses a grain of humanity and good, but I'm convinced that where Cheney is concerned, it may never have existed. Evil resides in that man, and what sickens me most is how others have embraced it, nurtured it, aided it.

So, there are some happy thoughts this morning, eh? I'm off from work until Tuesday, which pleases me greatly - I may have a smile on my face that won't go away for a couple days - and I'm feeling like organizing and re-arranging. It's supposed to rain later - actually, storm - so that may be the activity for today.

... on so many levels, commencing with the manner in which it was first ushered into office by that all too dubious 5-4 SCOTUS ruling.

Given that Bush v. Gore culminated in a selfish act of political expedience by five myopic justices who allowed their own personal preferences to override their better legal judgments, it's safe to say from the vantage point of hindsight that their specious legal reasoning in that case portended an awful lot of bad karma in store for our country, which we subsequently reaped in spades over the next eight very long years.

IMHO, Bush-Cheney was not only the most contemptible presidential administration in our own lifetimes, rivaled perhaps only by the Watergate-addled Nixon administration, it also proved itself to be by far the most incompetent, careening from one major disaster to another like a drunk driver bouncing off the guardrails. It is my earnest hope for the country that George W. Bush will be the worst president our own children will ever see and experience during their own lifetimes.

devoted a month to Merchant Ivory productions, not only the well known stiffly starched dramas like Howard's End, but the bulk of their work, which was produced, written, directed, etc., in India.

Why am I bringing this up? Because in one of those films, the "Street Musicians of Bombay," there was a mind boggling scene of a snake charmer doing his show. The live cobras weren't a surprise, but the interactions of the crowd with the cobras were.

Mostly, it was miss -- big time. But honestly, it's been so long since I've seen any of those movies, that it would probably do me good to watch a few of them again, just to see if I've matured enough to finally get what all the fuss was about.

Orwell, who was born Eric Arthur Blair, was born there while his father, Richard Blair, was posted in Bihar as an employee of the Indian Civil Service, to supervise the production of opium for export to China.

The media seems to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink at both parents, and while some of it is damning, they are nowhere near the threshold of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt with the father...and have almost nil with the mother.

Judging by reactions I've read online, it seems the public at large is ready to lynch both of them. And very very few are willing to not presume anything but guilt.

I know there is certainly a good chance one or both are guilty. But am I the only one not impressed by the trial by media going on right now only relaying the police and prosecutions side of the story?